Prudentia

  The Babel Range: Why High‑Range Tests Drift Toward Private Languages I have spent an unreasonable portion of my adult life watching high‑range IQ tests mutate. What began as a niche hobby—an odd corner of the internet where people solved puzzles for sport—has evolved into something stranger: a linguistic archipelago of private dialects, each spoken by exactly one person, the test author. The more I look at these tests, the more they resemble a Tower of Babel built in reverse: not a single language fracturing into many, but many languages invented to avoid being understood. The designers call this innovation. I call it drift. The drift begins innocently enough. A test is released. People solve it. Someone posts a solution key. Someone else writes a solver. A third person feeds it to a search engine. A fourth person feeds it to an AI. The designer, horrified that their creation has been “compromised,” vows to build a purer test next time—one that cannot be solved by search, by...

These days, I read a lot in the media about neuroatypicality, ADHD, and autism. These topics have been discussed since around 2008. I remember this so clearly because back then I published an article in my magazine Hugi about schizoid personality disorder and received feedback that many members of the computer art demo scene didn’t have a personality disorder, but rather a form of autism that exhibits similar symptoms. It could also be that it just seems to me that these topics come up often in the media because I live in a bubble. But the incident I want to write about here took place in 2004, at a time when neuroatypicality wasn’t yet a common term. At the time, I was working as a medical student in the Department of Hematology and Oncology at Vienna General Hospital. During the summer break, I had gotten into the habit of going to bed late because I spent a lot of time reading Wikipedia, which was still fairly new back then. As a result, I was sleep-deprived when a chief’s rounds to...

In April 2026, the media reported about a manifesto which Alex Karp, one of the founders of the software company Palantir, had posted to X. Many of these reports were negative and considered the manifesto a threat. When I learned that the manifesto was essentially a summary of a book published a year ago, The Technological Republic, I decided to get hold of the book to learn the message Karp wants to spread.   The central message of this book is that the software industry should support the state and be closely aligned with the government to combine "a pursuit of innovation with the objectives of the nation". The authors speak of a "national plan" to which every citizen should be committed, which should involve research and development in space travel, medicine, and military. The military is especially important. The adversaries of the West, most notably China and Russia, will invest in upgrading their military with artificial intelligence, the authors are su...

  The Ectopic Insight I live in the palliative pause! To the medical world, a “skip” of the heart is often an ectopic beat—a premature contraction that originates from somewhere other than the heart’s official pacemaker. It is an impatient spark. It fires before the chamber is ready, creating a beat that is functionally invisible to the outside world, followed by a sudden, heavy silence. Then comes the “thump”—the forceful, manual reset that everyone actually feels. When you operate with an IQ in the 140–160 range, your internal life is defined by a nearly identical phenomenon. I have come to call it the Ectopic Insight . In my mind, the “official pacemaker” of logic—the slow, rhythmic, one-two-three of systematic reasoning—is constantly being overridden by a faster, more aggressive signal. I don’t “think” through a problem; I experience a Neural Flutter . A rapid, high-frequency vibration where the patterns of a complex system become transparent all at once. Behind the scene...

Many members of high intelligence societies do not consider themselves truly intellectual. Partly, that's because being an intellectual also requires: knowledge and the ability to express one's thoughts and ideas. On the other hand, there are also many intellectuals who are not known for having a high IQ. Rather than with intelligence, they justify their status with academic credentials and reputation. I am currently working on a new project in my spare time that will hopefully remedy this situation. It will make high-IQ thinkers more visible and allow the audience to sort out intellectuals of actually low intelligence. Stay tuned. Claus D. Volko 

On April 14th, 2026, the new book by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler was released. Two days later, it arrived in my mailbox. I immediately started reading it and got hooked. Then I completed each of the three parts of the book in one day. Now it is time for me to write a review. While I've recently written an article about the end of the world coming soon, Diamandis and Kotler provide the reader with an optimistic outlook on the future. Backed by a lot of diagrams in the appendices, they show that poverty has dramatically decreased all over the planet, access to modern technologies just as the smartphone has become nearly universal, an increasing share of the world population is living in democracies, and so on. The authors draw analogies to the Holy Scripture and Carl Jung's archetypes, maybe to target the religious American readership. They postulate that humans have gained godlike powers and write that, as Spider Man said, "with great power comes great responsibility...